Free From the Corner of His Eye by Dean Koontz Page A

saturated the padding of the stretcher on which her body lay. So much blood. Oceans.
    Into the eerie hush came a voice. No other sound. No siren. No hum or swish of tires on rain-washed pavement. Only the voice of the paramedic: “Her heart’s stopped.”
    Far below Agnes, down there in the land of the living, light glimmered along the barrel of a hypodermic syringe in the hand of the paramedic, glinted from the tip of the needle.
    The cop had unzipped the top of her jogging suit and pulled up the roomy T-shirt she wore under it, exposing her breasts.
    The paramedic put aside the needle, having used it, and grabbed the paddles of a defibrillator.
    Agnes wanted to tell them that all their efforts would be to no avail, that they should cease and desist, be kind and let her go. She had no reason to stay here anymore. She was moving on to be with her dead husband and her dead baby, moving on to a place where there was no pain, where no one was as poor as Maria Elena Gonzalez, where no one lived with fear like her brothers Edom and Jacob, where everyone spoke a single language and had all the blueberry pies they needed.
    She embraced the darkness.

Chapter 13
    AFTER DR. PARKHURST departed, a silence lay on the hospital room, heavier and colder than the ice bags that were draped across Junior’s midsection.
    After a while, he dared to crack his eyelids. Pressing against his eyes was a blackness as smooth and as unrelenting as any known by a blind man. Not even a ghost of light haunted the night beyond the window, and the slats of the venetian blind were as hidden from view as the meatless ribs under Death’s voluminous black robe.
    From the corner armchair, as if he could see so well in the dark that he knew Junior’s eyes were open, Detective Thomas Vanadium said, “Did you hear my entire conversation with Dr. Parkhurst?”
    Junior’s heart knocked so hard and fast that he wouldn’t have been surprised if Vanadium, at the far end of the room, had begun to tap his foot in time with it.
    Although Junior had not answered, Vanadium said, “Yes, I thought you heard it.”
    A trickster, this detective. Full of taunts and feints and sly stratagems. Psychological-warfare artist.
    Perhaps a lot of suspects were rattled and ultimately unnerved by this behavior. Junior wouldn’t be easily trapped. He was smart.
    Applying his intelligence now, he employed simple meditation techniques to calm himself and to slow his heartbeat. The cop was trying to rattle him into making a mistake, but calm men did not incriminate themselves.
    “What was it like, Enoch? Did you look into her eyes when you pushed her?” Vanadium’s uninflected monologue was like the voice of a conscience that preferred to torture by droning rather than by nagging. “Or doesn’t a woman-killing coward like you have the guts for that?”
    Pan-faced, double-chinned, half-bald, puke-collecting asshole,
Junior thought.
    No. Wrong attitude. Be calm. Be indifferent to insult.
    “Did you wait until her back was turned, too gutless even to meet her eyes?”
    This was pathetic. Only thickheaded fools, unschooled and unworldly, would be shaken into confession by ham-handed tactics like these.
    Junior was educated. He wasn’t merely a masseur with a fancy title; he had earned a full bachelor of science degree with a major in rehabilitation therapy. When he watched television, which he never did to excess, he rarely settled for frivolous game shows or sitcoms like
Gomer Pyle
or
The Beverly Hillbillies,
or even
I Dream of Jeannie,
but committed himself to serious dramas that required intellectual involvement—
Gunsmoke, Bonanza,
and
The Fugitive.
He preferred Scrabble to all other board games, because it expanded one’s vocabulary. As a member in good standing of the Book-of-the-Month Club, he’d already acquired nearly thirty volumes of the finest in contemporary literature, and thus far he’d read or skim-read more than six of them. He would have read all of them if he